HIS Radeon R9 270X IceQ X2 Overview

Designed and priced to compete with the NVIDIA GTX 660Ti and 760 video cards, the R9 270X is equivalent to a Radeon HD7870. Unfortunately I don’t have either of the GTX 660ti or a GTX 760 video cards to compare to so in the tests the HIS Radeon R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost 2GB video card will be tested against a GTX 560Ti and a HD 7950 video cards.

HIS first introduced the IceQ X2 VGA cooler with their HD 7970 GHz edition video card. This is a slightly smaller unit but follows the same design brief. Measuring 27cm long and 14cm tall it is slightly smaller than the behemoth that we saw in the HIS R9 280X 3GB video card. Weight will be an issue but thankfully HIS have taken this into consideration and have built support into the cooler design.

From the side view we can the 6mm heatpipes used in this design to take heat from the core into the heatsink. At the thickest point the HIS Radeon R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost 2GB video card is 4.2cm thick. HIS have chosen length over girth in the cooler design to maintain a 2-slot thickness. This model requires two 6-pin power connectors from your PSU.

The IceQ X2 cooler is an open air design that will inevitably exhaust warm air inside your PC case. There are vents on the backplate to take some of this air outside of your case but you will need to rely on you PC case cooling system to disperse ~95% of the hot air generated. Five 6mm heatpipes take the heat from the GPU via a solid copper heatsink into the aluminium fin array.

With the IceQ X2 cooler removed from the HIS Radeon R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost 2GB video card we see an integrated component/mosfet/memory cooler that also doubles as a PCB support plate. With a decent fan pointed in its direction there is nothing stopping you from fitting a universal GPU water block to this card.

The HIS Radeon R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost 2GB video card features specially designed fans that increase airflow without increasing noise. These 89mm dual-axial fans are rated with a life span of up to 50,000 hours.